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Many-to-Many

« Freedom of Anonymous Speech | Main | Wikipedia, academia and Seigenthaler »

December 12, 2005

Tag, you're gay!

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Posted by David Weinberger

The Guardian has a story by Mark Honigsbaum about an attempt to identify gay-related items:

Backed by the museums documentation watchdog, MDA, the group Proud Heritage this week began sending out a two-page survey requesting that institutions throughout the country list the gay and lesbian documents and artefacts in their collections. “For the first time ever, we are asking museums, libraries and archives throughout Britain to revisit their holdings and reveal what they have that is queer,” said Proud Heritage’s director Jack Gilbert. “At the moment these are not classified correctly, or held completely out of context and never see the light of day.”

… At the Lllangolen Museum in Denbighshire, north Wales, for instance, there is an exhibit commemorating the lives of Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby. Known locally as the Ladies of Llangollen, they lived together in a small cottage from 1819 until their deaths in 1829 and 1831, and were renowned for wearing dark riding habits, an eccentric choice of dress for the time.

“They would never have used the word lesbian to describe their relationship but there is no question that they lived together and shared the same bed,” said Mr Gilbert. “We think there may well be similar examples in other archives, but because people didn’t use words like lesbian and gay 200 years ago archivists have either overlooked it or simply don’t realise it’s there.”

Great example of why authors/creators/publishers are not the best or final taggers of their own stuff. (Thanks to Phil Edwards for the link.)

Comments (12) + TrackBacks (1) | Category: social software


COMMENTS

1. Alison on December 12, 2005 11:28 AM writes...

Just to pick up on the Welsh spelling, its spelt Llangollen.

Ll - its a letter of the Welsh alphabet.

Permalink to Comment

2. anon on December 12, 2005 11:44 AM writes...

There's no link to the story! Could you please link to it?

Permalink to Comment

3. tada on December 12, 2005 10:11 PM writes...

http://education.guardian.co.uk/elearning/story/0,,1665299,00.html

Permalink to Comment

4. Matt on December 13, 2005 4:10 PM writes...

Does anyone here have any clue how the author archives were set up? I'm trying to create a large group blog and I'm wondering if the archives are fully dynamic or if authors names need to be keyed in manually each time one is added. Could you maybe put me in contact with the site designer?

mewaters at gmail dot com

Permalink to Comment

5. Phil Edwards on December 14, 2005 5:46 AM writes...

Cheers, Dave. More linkage: my own thoughts on the subject are here. From that post:

"Museums promote the illusion that the map is the territory: the structure and layout of the galleries, and the arrangement of the exhibits they contain, are designed to reproduce a certain way of structuring knowledge. (The perfect museum would be its own memory palace.) But an illusion is what it is. Objects can only reside in one place, but knowledge can be fluid and multi-dimensional"

Permalink to Comment

6. Cybersoc on January 9, 2006 6:21 AM writes...

One of the problems with user tagging of content is the possibility that people or corporations that have been "mistagged" will feel this they've been libelled. See http://www.cybersoc.com/2005/04/libel_threat_to.html

Permalink to Comment

7. brittney robinson on January 25, 2006 11:04 AM writes...

i thought that this website was supposed to be about gay PEOPLE what is up with that

Permalink to Comment

8. Mickael on February 12, 2006 8:39 AM writes...

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Permalink to Comment

9. Jeorge on February 13, 2006 1:46 AM writes...

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Permalink to Comment

10. Alice on March 12, 2006 1:52 PM writes...

Mad crazy lol I going to tag a m8

Permalink to Comment

11. voyeur on April 6, 2006 1:33 PM writes...

http://Gayleria.blogspot.com

Permalink to Comment

12. Noel Pettis on November 1, 2006 2:25 AM writes...

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Permalink to Comment

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Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Tag, you're gay!:

Tagging Evolution from GROOP.US
Over at Many-to-Many David Weinberger gives an interesting example how metadata is context sensitive. Libraries and archives are asked to scan their holdings for historical documents about gay/lesbian people. This is not an easy endeavor since people... [Read More]

Tracked on December 16, 2005 12:07 PM

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